Cancel the 'Burn a Quran' Day!

A large Florida church, the Dove World Outreach Center, recently announced that it would be hosting a Quran burning event on its church property in commemoration of the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. They have termed the event "The International Quran Burning Day" and believe it will help warn Americans about the dangers of Islam.

In a recent interview, the Senior Pastor of the church, Dr. Terry Jones explained, “We only did it because we felt there needed to be an outcry against Islam, because Islam is presenting itself as a religion of peace.”

However, America’s biggest evangelical body is now urging Terry Jones and his church to cancel the event entirely.

The National Association of Evangelicals on Thursday said that the event would show complete “disrespect” for Muslims and only serve to “exacerbate tensions” between the two religions worldwide.

“It sounds like the proposed Quran burning is rooted in revenge,” said NAE President Leith Anderson, in a statement. “Yet the Bible says that Christians should ‘make sure that nobody pays back wrong for wrong, but always try to be kind to each other and to everyone else’ (I Thessalonians 5:15).”

“The most powerful statement by the organizers of the planned September 11th bonfire would be to call it off in the name and love of Jesus Christ,” Anderson urged.

The NAE represents more than 45,000 local churches from well over forty denominations. Another NAE representative, Pastor Joel Hunter, said that, “We have to recognize that fighting fire with fire only builds a bigger fire.”

“Love is the water that will eventually quench the destruction,” he said.

The Council on American-Islam Relations, the nation’s largest Muslim advocacy group, plans to counter “International Burn a Quran Day” with a “Share the Quran” dinner on Sept. 11.

(To read the full article, please go to http://www.christianpost.com).

Google Sponsors Ancient Texts Project

Google has set up a new Digital Humanities Research Program which recently granted funding towards a project that will make ancient texts easier to locate and access online.

The project will be entitled the Google Ancient Places (GAP), and will be led by Leif Isaksen of the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science, Dr. Elton Barker from The Open University and Dr. Eric Kansa of the University of California-Berkeley. This project is one of twelve different projects to share a total of $497,000 in awards from Google.

The GAP project will make possible searching within Google Books to find content related to a geographic location and within a particular timeframe. Search results would then be visible using GoogleMaps or GoogleEarth.

“We are very excited about the potential of this project,” Leif Isaksen said. “Up to now many ancient texts have been accessible only at elite institutions or have been very hard to find; now a much wider range of people will be able to discover them. This work will really help open up the field and lead to many further projects.”

(To read the full article, please go to http://www.bib-arch.org).

Religious Wars Find New Battle Grounds in Bus Ads

The conservative group 'Stop Islamization of America,' which has been in the news previously concerning its militant actions to prevent a mosque from being built near Ground Zero, has hit the headlines again. This time because they are behind a series of bus adverts in major American cities that recommend ways and means of leaving the Islamic faith. This has further heightened public debate about the general role that religion plays in society, and in particular the relationship between the State, Christianity and Islam.

The adverts which are placed on the side of city buses read: "Fatwa on your head? Is your family or community threatening you? Leaving Islam? Got questions? Get answers!"

The ads seem to be in response to recent bus advert campaigns placed by groups interested in creating a more positive image for Islam in a country where 38 percent of people polled believe Islam is more likely to encourage violence than other religions.

In New York, the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community funded a campaign of adverts which say, "Muslims for Peace. Love for All – Hatred for None." A spokesperson for the group, said that their campaign was part of an ongoing effort to reclaim the public image of Islam, which he says has been "hijacked by extremists."

"It's an effort to have the Muslims, the silent majority, snatch the flag of Islam away from these extremists and hoist it above ourselves," he says.

Pam Geller, who is the executive director of ‘Stop Islamization of America’ and a self-termed "anti-jihadist," says that her bus adverts have been inspired by the real life examples of American Muslims who have converted to Christianity and then had to flee from their family and friends for their own safety. She cites the well-known example of Rifqa Bary, who in 2009 claimed her own father made death threats against her for becoming a Christian. Thus, Geller proclaims the bus ad campaign forms part of their greater “defense of religious freedom,” the aim of which is "to help ex-Muslims who are in trouble" and also "to raise awareness of the threat that apostates live under even in the West."

However, other religious rights organizations believe the campaign is nothing more than an attempt to provoke further apprehensions about a faith that, according to most studies, is still hugely misunderstood by the general public, says The Christian Science Monitor.

(To read this article in full, please go to http://www.csmonitor.com).

UK Hospitals Plan Bible Ban

Religious leaders are up in arms over plans by the Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust to ban Bibles from patients' bedside cabinets.

The Bible ban plan is not due to religious or political reasons but because of medical ones. Hospital officials say that the Bibles are difficult to clean and thus notorious germ carriers. It is believed that the ban will help prevent infectious superbugs such as MRSA.

However, religious leaders feel that hospital patients will be deprived of spiritual nourishment at at time when they most sorely need it.

A spokeswoman for the Diocese of Southwell and Nottingham, which oversees 300 churches, said: “For many patients Bibles have been a source of comfort and support through uncertainty and illness. It is unsatisfactory that patients may now have to ask a nurse for a Bible to look at.”

She urged the trust to look at alternative solutions such as shrink-wrapping or placing plastic covers on the Bibles.

The Hospital bosses are now going through a stringent consulting process with staff, patients and chaplains before enforcing the ban.

OPINION: How Technology Is Changing, or Should Change, the Way the Gospel Is Shared

(By Dr. Dion Forster)

The German theologian Helmut Thielicke once commented, “The Gospel must be constantly forwarded to a new address because its recipient is repeatedly changing his place of residence.”(1) This is a very challenging yet true observation about the nature of mission and evangelism.

One of the most significant Christian books of our era is Philip Jenkins’ The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity.(2) Jenkins quotes Philip Yancey, who notes that:

"As I travel, I have observed a pattern, a strange historical phenomenon of God “moving” geographically from the Middle East to Europe to North America to the developing world. My theory is this: God goes where he’s wanted."(3)

There is no doubt that the geographical movement of Christianity throughout history has radically changed the manner in which the gospel is shared—from its birth in Israel among disenfranchised Jewish peasants; to a state-sanctioned religion under the emperor Constantine; through Europe and the Reformation; taking a detour via the dominance of media and mega-church-driven North American Christianity of our recent history; to where Christianity seems to be finding its place among African, Asian, and South American believers. Each new context presents challenges and opportunities for the gospel and the faith.

The Next Shift in Global Christianity:

But what if the next shift in Christendom is not merely a geographical shift, but in fact a shift into cyberspace—a movement of a completely different kind?

Let me qualify what I am suggesting. Yancey and Jenkins have suggested that Christianity is dominant where the Christian population is most present (numerically) and most influential. This shift can be traced throughout history as different people in different places (geographical locations) have gathered in communities of influence to develop the theology and strategy for sharing the gospel.

However, what if the next major gathering of believers is not bound to a single geographical location, but rather is characterized as some form of scattered “gathering”—a means of drawing together across geographical boundaries with a common mind and purpose? Up to fairly recently, such a shift was not possible.

The limits of effective communication in order to share ideas, create community, and develop influence were simply not possible via single direction broadcast mediums (written letters, messengers, even faxes and telegraphs). However, with the advent of fast, reliable, and pervasive communication technologies, the possibilities for communication and connection are changing. The globe is smaller!

Consider this amazing little fact—at the time of writing this article, the Internet social media website Facebook had just passed the 400 million user mark. If one were to compare the users of Facebook to the populations of countries across the world, you may be surprised to discover that Facebook has the third largest population in the world (bigger than the United States, Indonesia, and Brazil).(4) If Facebook continues to grow at its current rate, it will soon be one of the most populace communities in the world.

That is significant! How many ministries and churches are taking this “scattered community” seriously? Are we sending the message of the gospel to places from which the recipients have already moved?

The Relationship between Technology, Evangelism, and the Apostles:

For some years I used to teach an introductory course on the New Testament at the University of Pretoria. At the start of the year I would often ask the students, “Who was the most prominent apostle in the New Testament?” Theological critique aside, most of the students would reply, “Paul.” When I asked them why they thought this, their reasoning was most often because Paul wrote two-thirds of the letters and epistles in the New Testament.

Of course, it is historically and theologically more accurate to point out that Peter was the most prominent apostle; after all, it is upon Peter that Christ founded the Church (Matthew 16:18). However, there is little doubt that history has given Paul and his ministry a special place in Christendom.

Simply stated, Paul understood and used the dominant technology of his time (letter writing), and through this, his ministry has left a lasting legacy and impact. What this illustration suggests is that language and the medium of communication are as important as location of those with whom we wish to communicate. If you send a letter written in English to a village in Africa where the only person who can read has moved on, it doesn’t matter how eloquent the letter is, its effect will have been lost!

I would contend that the Internet and social media on the Internet are the most important communication (and community forming) technologies of our time. Not only are new media technologies like Facebook and Twitter giving us some indication of the location of the world’s population, they are also giving us an indication of the language this new location requires.

The New Language for the New Location:

It is important to remember that geography is playing less of a formative role in the identity of emerging generations—for example, in South Africa there are many English-speaking children who have adopted American accents since their primary exposure to the English language comes through American cartoons and sitcoms, and of course YouTube. It is not strange to find African, European, and even Asian teenagers who have more in common with the youth of California than their native context. Media has an increasingly dominant role in the formation of cultural identity—such identity is no longer primarily dictated by geographic boundaries.

Thus, simply knowing the location of the population(5) is not enough for truly effective evangelism and missions. We need to “listen” to the emerging language these platforms are generating. Just as earlier shifts in the gospel (from Jerusalem, to Rome, to England, to America) required a change in language, so this new shift will require the emergence of a new language through which the gospel is communicated. Below are some of the lessons we are learning from social networking tools and platforms.

• Text remains an important form of communication. However, long-form text (books and articles) is much less effective than short-form text. For example, Twitter allows only 140 characters of text to be posted. Status updates on Facebook are seldom longer than one or two short sentences. The intention of textual communication is changing. Whereas text has always been used primarily as a means of communicating facts (i.e., statistics, ideas, findings, experiences), social networking is showing us that text is transformed from a broadcast medium (i.e., communicating facts) to a mechanism to solicit interaction. This leads to the next important linguistic shift that the new online location is showing.

• Community is more important that communication. The average user on Facebook is connected to 130 persons. This allows for a far greater reach than was possible in previous generations. Only one hundred years ago the majority of the world’s population would not have had significant contact with a person in a different city or town, let alone a person on a different continent. Today such contacts are common.

• There is a shift from data to wisdom. According to the “shift happens” team, there are thirty-one billion searches on www.google.com every month. In 2006, there were only 2.7 billion searches. It is estimated that a week’s worth of the New York Times newspaper contains more information than a person would come across in their whole lifetime in the eighteenth century.(6) Data and information are no longer a commodity in a world where persons can find facts on the Internet. This has led to development of knowledge engines such as “Wolfram Alpha,” which takes information and applies complex computational processes to extract knowledge.(7)

In a more organic way, we have seen aggregated search results (such as “trending topics” on Twitter) become a valuable commodity for people to sift through the overabundance of data that is available. Social networking is showing that persons value trusted sources, authoritative voices, and services that can help them find what is necessary and valuable.

Concluding Thoughts:

There are many other important things that can be learned from social media and social networking.(8) However, it is my hope that these few insights would stimulate some thought around the “language” churches and ministry groups use to engage people with the unchanging and ever-powerful gospel of Christ.

Christians, and the Church, in every age have to make some necessary shifts in order to effectively communicate the gospel to a moving population. Just as Paul’s letters transformed and built the early Church, and the Guttenberg Press transformed the Church around the time of the Reformation, so I believe the Internet, and particularly social media, is challenging us to transform the way in which we engage the world with the love of Jesus.

__________
(This article was originally written for Lausanne World Pulse and is included here by permission. See www.lausanneworldpulse.com for other excellent articles and mission conversation opportunities. Dr. Dion Angus Forster is a minister and academic. He is the former dean of John Wesley College, the seminary of the Methodist Church of southern Africa, and a research associate and lecturer in systematic theology at the University of Stellenbosch (BUVTON). Forster serves as a chaplain to the Global Day of Prayer and the Power Group of companies in Cape Town, South Africa. His most recent book on Christianity in southern Africa is entitled What Are We Thinking? Reflections on Church and Society).

Endnotes:
1. 2007. In Mission Shaped Youth: Rethinking Young People and the Church. Eds. Tim Sudworth, Graham Cray, and Chris Russell. London: Church House Publishing, 11.
2. 2002. The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity. Oxford. Oxford University Press.
3. Ibid, 15.
4. See http://econsultancy.com/blog/5324-20+-mind-blowing-social-media-statistics-revisited for the number of registered users on Facebook as of 9 April 2010. For more up-to-date statistics on registered Facebook users, see www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics. Compare this to the population size of countries across the world at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population; also see this older article on the size of Facebook in relation to population numbers in various countries across the world www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_big_is_facebook.php.
5. Statistics on user numbers for various popular social networking and new media platforms: Facebook (over 400 million users), Twitter (75 million user), and Linkedin (50 million users). See http://econsultancy.com/blog/5324-20+-mind-blowing-social-media-statistics-revisited and www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics.
6. http://theinspirationroom.com/daily/2009/shift-happens-updated-in-did-you-know-4-0/
7. See www.dionforster.com/blog/2009/7/13/moving-from-information-to-knowledge.html and www.dionforster.com/blog/2009/7/14/sustainable-economies-world-resources-and-wolframalpha.html for a brief discussion on this tool.
8. I have discussed the application of social media and social networking tools for ministry here: www.dionforster.com/blog/2009/10/27/a-superb-video-how-the-world-is-changing-new-media-and-minis.html and here www.dionforster.com/blog/2009/9/6/using-media-in-ministry-redux-facebook-twitter-blogs-youtube.html.

Lady Gaga and the French Nuns

So what does Lady Gaga have in common with a secluded convent of Benedictine nuns from southern France? Well, for one, they have been signed by the same record label, says the Washington Post.

The nuns beat out 70 other convents in a world-wide search to find the best female singers of Gregorian chant. They hail from an order that dates all the way back to the sixth century and are a cloistered order: they live in isolation and can only communicate with guests (even family) through a grill.

"We never sought this, it came looking for us," said Reverend Mother Abbess at the Abbaye de Notre-Dame de l'Annonciation near Avignon. "At first we were worried it would affect our cloistered life, so we asked St. Joseph in prayer. Our prayers were answered."

The record label, Decca Records which is a unit of Universal is set to release the album in November. They also manage contracts for superstar singers such as Elton John, The Rolling Stones and of course Lady Gaga, who was after all, educated at a convent.

Dickon Stainer, the chief of Decca Records, said that it was quite an ordeal to get the contract signed. "I passed the contract through the grill, they signed it and passed it back."

To protect their way of life the nuns will film their own adverts and photograph the album cover.

To keep their privacy the sisters will also film their own television advert and photograph the album cover.

The abbess said the nuns decided to record the album in the hope that it would touch people's lives.

(To read the full story, please go to http://washingtonpost.com).

Solomon’s Temple to be Rebuilt in Brazil

As Jews celebrate Tisha B’av, a day of fasting in remembrance of the destruction of the First and Second Jewish Temples in ancient Jerusalem, a Brazilian megachurch in São Paulo has managed to receive building authorization to begin construction on a 10,000 seat imitation of Solomon’s Temple, according to the New York Times.

The church will cost around $200 million and take four years to complete. Bishop Edir Macedo, the founder of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, the church behind the building, says that the end construction will be 180 feet high, which is almost twice as high as the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro.

The Bishop also said that the same type stones as used by Solomon had been ordered from Jerusalem and that the structure would include a sanctuary, Bible schools, television and radio studios and a 1,000 space parking lot. The Bishop also reported that a leader of the city’s Jews was fascinated by their project and felt that it might combat anti-Semitism by educating locals about Israel.

The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God has been in the news before. In 1998, Alan Riding reported for The Times (U.K.) that the São Paulo police department was looking into charges that the church “pretends to cure people by expelling the Devil from their bodies, using grotesque and humiliating gestures reminiscent of the barbaric sects of the Middle Ages.”